Design Thinking Learning Unit

Design Thinking for Education

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What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking" is a human-centred design approach.

The central focus of design thinking is understanding the needs of people and creating solutions that fill their needs. The model focuses on asking "good" questions, generating and exploring ideas, and repeating cycles of testing and improvement. Design thinking was developed by innovation and engineering firms in an attempt to make the process of designing more aligned with the scientific method.

History of Design Thinking

What is Design Thinking - More

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The 5 Phases of Design Thinking

There are 5 phases of design thinking:

EMPATHY DEFINE IDEATE PROTOTYPE TEST

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The 5 Phases: Overview

Click on each one to learn more. Then, click the arrow for a deep-dive into the content.

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Empathize

The key purpose of the empathize stage is to understand your learner. Empathy is the foundation of human-centered design. The problems you’re trying to solve are rarely your own, they’re those of particular users. Build empathy for your users by learning their values.

To empathize, you:

• Observe. View users and their behavior in the context of their lives.
• Engage. Interact with and interview users through both scheduled and short ‘intercept’ encounters.
• Immerse. Wear your users’ shoes. Experience what they experience for a mile or two.

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Presentation

Empathize

Exercise: When observing and engaging, you may try to find out things like:

• Personal details: who did you observe and/or speak with (profession, age, location, etc)?

• Interesting stories: what was the most memorable and surprising story you heard?

• Motivations: what did people seem to care about the most? What appeared to motivate them?

• Frustrations: what pain points, barriers, confusions, or errors did people experience?

• Interactions: what was interesting about the way people interacted with the environment?

• Remaining Questions: what questions would you like to explore in your next observation or interview?

If possible, immerse yourself in your users’ experience. Find (or create if necessary) ways to insert yourself in specific environments to understand first hand who you’re designing for.

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Define

The define step in the design thinking process is usually seen as a “narrowing” activity. After collecting volumes of user information at the empathy stage, it is time to distill down to one specific user group and their needs. Narrowing the focus is important, because as you gain a clearer understanding of what your observations mean, you can use them as inspiration to solve your challenge.

In the define stage, you will convert early insights into actionable ideas through the following activities:

• Capturing Learnings. Learnings are the recollections of what stood out during a conversation or observation: direct quotes, anecdotes, notes on sounds, smells, textures, colours, etc.
• Identifying Themes. Themes are created after you have organized your observations from field research into categories. They are the headlines for clusters of similar learnings.
• Distilling Insights. Insights are a succinct expression of what you have learned from your field research activities. They always offer a new perspective, even if they are not new discoveries. They are inspiring and relevant to your challenge.
• Crafting Messaging. Experiment with the wording and structure to best communicate your insights. Create short and memorable sentences that get to the point. Share your message with an outsider to check whether they need more refining.

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Define

In this stage of the design thinking process, you will work hard to identify and focus on the problem you strive to address and/or the challenge you are seeking to solve. A clearly defined design challenge will guide your questions and help you stay on track throughout the innovation process. Write a short brief that clarifies the challenge you plan to address. Write it as if you were handing it to someone else to design with. Capture your thoughts on why this is a problem, and what the opportunity for a design innovation will be.

Reframe the challenge. In order to be truly generative, you must reframe your challenge or problem into an opportunity for innovation. You can do this by rewriting the problem statement beginning with “how might we?” questions. Keep it simple. Describe your challenge simply and optimistically. Make it broad enough to allow you to discover areas of unexpected value, and narrow enough to make the topic manageable. Define your measures of success. What else are you working toward? What will make this work successful? What are the measures of success? Examples include number of people who sign up for your program, number of positive reviews, number of new clients, increased user engagement, etc. Most of the time, these measures of success emerge as your project develops, but it helps to start to think about metrics of success such as this at the onset.

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Ideate

Ideation means generating lots of ideas. Design thinkers use divergent and convergent thinking to come up with fresh solutions. After brainstorming to generate many options and ideas (divergence), you will need to rank, sort, combine, and select the best of them (convergence) for further development.

Expand your ideas to further develop them by asking:

• Who can use this and what problem does it solve?
• Where and when will this be used?
• How can I improve this idea?
• What do I need to make this idea work?

Activity

Which stage of design thinking do you consider most challenging for you to engage in? What are some strategies that might help you?